Smooth Spaces and Rough-Edged Places:
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II begin with a puzzle of sorts. Time is one; space is two -- at least two. Time comes always already unified, one time. Thus we say "What time is it now?" and not "Which time is it now?" We don't ask, "What space is it?" Yet we might ask: "Which space are we in?" (and we certainly do ask "Which place am I in?"). Any supposed symmetry of time and space is skewed from the start. If time is self-consolidating -- constantly gathering itself together in coherent units such as years or hours or semesters or seasons -- space is self-proliferating. Take, for example, the dimensionality of space. One dimension in space is represented by a point or a line, whose radically reduced format mocks the extensiveness of cosmic space. Two dimensions, as in a plane figure, also falls far short of our sense that space spreads out indefinitely far beyond the perceiving subject. Only with three dimensions do we begin to approach an adequation between the structure and the sense of space. For then the subject is surrounded by something sufficiently roomy to live and move in. (English "room" and German Raum are distant linguistic cousins.) Indeed, as Aristotle, Kant, and Merleau-Ponty all remark, the three-dimensionality of space directly reflects our bodily state, i.e., the fact that as upright beings three perpendicular planes implicitly meet and intersect in us. Even here, proliferation abounds: our bilateral symmetry means that each dimension is doubled: one vertical plane bifurcates into 'up' and 'down', the other vertical plane into 'front' and 'back', and the horizontal plane into 'right' and 'left'. Thus subject-centered space is triple, only to be redoubled. And if we think of spatiality not as body-based but as locatory -- as determined by landmarks and other locales in the environment -- the proliferation is still more striking. There are the four cardinal directions, which themselves split easily into the thirty two points of a compass. Nor need we be so arithmetically well-rounded. Even apart from fancy mathematical models of n-dimensional space, and recent technological instantiations of virtual space, there is no end to the number or ways in which we can be oriented in space -- in accordance with what Deleuze and Guattari call "the variability, the polyvocity of directions" by which we can move in any given spatial scene.1 But beyond (or rather underlying) direction is place. Heidegger remarks that "space has been split up into places."2 The fact is that we continually find ourselves immersed in a multiplex spatial network whose nodal points are supplied by particular places. If space is infinitely large, place is indefinitely many. This suggests that the ultimate source of spatial self-proliferation is not the body or the way the world is but the placialization of space itself. If so, the distinction between space and place is not derivative but generative. That is why I began by saying that "space is two -- at least two." Space is a doublet composed of itself (whatever that is ) and place. You may well respond: time, too, is always different, not the same as it was even a moment ago, perhaps never the same as itself, self-split at its origin (as Derrida might put it), while space abides through the before and after of time. If I pitch a tent on a mountain in norothwest Massachusetts just as the sun is going down, night comes on, bringing with it an ever-changing array of nocturnal sounds and sights, the scene never exactly alike from moment to moment. I fall asleep eventually in this evanescent world, and when I awake in the morning I find myself reassuringly in the same circumambient landscape -- the same "space." Here space seems permanent and time fleeting. Is it not time that is the dispersive element? Time qua change "disperses subsistence," says Aristotle in the Physics, while place in contrast is said merely to "contain" things.3 Yet even if time is thus ever self-differing, the very medium of change, this does not mean that there is more than one kind of time operative in any given circumstance. When we ask "What is today's date?" and (more generally) "what time is it?" we are not asking about which of several sorts of time now obtains. Aristotle himself remarks that "time is everywhere the same."4 Even when one distinguishes between a felt or "phenomenological" time and an "objective" time -- as do Bergson, James, and Husserl -- one will manage, sooner or later, to re-unify these times so as to obviate incoherence. We witness such re-unification, for example, in Husserl's celebrated "time-diagram," which maps objective time (as represented by successive points on a horizontal line) onto experienced or durational time, in the form of vertical and diagonal lines stemming from the first line. Even the three main modes of time we call "past," "present," and "future" are finally aspects of one temporal sweep, one continuous display of time, however jarring their juxtaposition may be in a given case. Every time we feel time's passing or coming, we cannot help but think of the coming or passing as parts of one encompassing time. Doubtless this is why Kant argued in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" that time, not space, is the truly universal form of intuition, that within which all appearances, inner and outer alike, are forcibly included. It would be altogether Kantian to say that the unio mentalis is effected by a unio temporalis. In time, as in mind, the disjuncta membra of our experience come together. The vanishing of moments in temporal succession proves thus to be only one aspect of the larger picture of Time: as Kant reminds us, the schema of succession is flanked by those of permanence and coexistence, both of which are totalizing in their distinctly different ways. Space, of course, is also totalizing -- which is why Kant paired it with time in the Aesthetic (as a co-ordinate form of intuition) and in the Antinomies of Pure Reason (where the totalizing tendencies of both create insuperable metaphysical problems). But we don't need Kant to tell us of the encompassingness of space: camping in Massachusetts, I was reassuringly surrounded by the spatial spread of the open landscape at all times. Yet as I lingered in that landscape I noticed something else happening, something that did not belong simply to the order of space as sheer extension. This was my momentary camp itself, the place I created on the modest mountain where I pitched my tent, built a fire, talked with friends, and gazed out on the landscape itself. This place was not just an aspect or part of the total space of the situation -- even if it is true that it was located in that world-space. (On a topographic map, my camp would certainly have a precise position; but this position in cartographic space does not begin to capture, much less exhaust, my sense of being in a particular mountain-place.) The place was unique: I could pitch the same tent, talk with the same fellow campers, and even (perhaps) have the same thoughts, but if all this occurred on a neighboring and even quite similar mountain, the place would be quite different. And it would be different even if the sense of surrounding space stayed much the same. Thus we are back to the divergence between space and place, that troubled and troubling doublet. To mark this divergence, many languages -- certainly most European languages -- distinguish between "place" and "space" (e.g., locus vs. spatium; lieu or endroit vs. espace; luogo vs. spazio; Platz or Ort vs. Raum; etc.). These same languages do not make a comparably decisive distinction between two senses or types of time. We have to strain words to talk consistently of a difference between, say, "temporality" and "time" or "duration" and "time" (in Heidegger's and Bergson's terms, respectively). Philosophers may remark the difference, but common sense and ordinary experience are largely oblivious of it. Time insists on its own oneness, whereas Space tends toward twoness in its disparity from place, its binary other.
II
The difference between space and place is one of the best-kept secrets in philosophy. Above all in modern philosophy, where the very distinction came to be questioned and then discredited: one way of understanding modernity, as I shall suggest later on, is by its very neglect of this distinction. The ancient world, however, knew otherwise -- knew better. Indeed, the pre-modern and the post-modern join forces in a common recognition of the importance of place as something essentially other than space, something one cannot afford to ignore in its very difference from space. Let me only remind you that Plato in the Timaeus draws on the difference between ch¯ra and topos. Conventionally translated as "land," "area,"' or "space," ch¯ra is the realm of Necessity, anank÷, and is said to be "the Receptacle -- as it were, the nurse -- of all Becoming."5 Ch¯ra is the ultimate "in which" (en h¯) for changeable and changing entities, their "seat"(hedra): "by nature it is there as a matrix (exmageion) for everything"(50 c). Ch¯ra is space-like in two ways: first, it provides "room" (i.e., space to be ococupied) for that which becomes; second, it is homogeneous or neutral in constitution: "that which is to receive in itself all kinds must be free from all characters [of its own]"(50 e). This last characterization may well look ahead, as Heidegger intimates, to the modern idea of a homogeneous space,6 but it also anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's conception of a "smooth space" composed of a non-homogeneous "space of contact, of small tactile and manual actions... a field without conduits or channels" -- typified in a steppe, a desert, or the open sea -- a field of flux that resists the "striation" effected by parallel lines of force (especially those traced out by gravity).7 Yet the very action of ch¯ra -- its violent thrashing motion -- has the effect of grouping the four elementary "kinds" or "powers" into four "regions" (ch¯rai) within which particular "places"(topoi) arise: because it was filled with powers that were neither alike nor evenly balanced, there was [at first] no equipoise in any region of it; but it was everywhere swayed unevenly and shaken by these things, and by its motion shook them in turn. And they, being thus moved, were perpetually being separated and carried in different directions; just as when things are shaken and winnowed by means of winnowing baskets and other instruments for cleaning corn, the dense and heavy things go one way, while the rare and light are carried to another place and settle there. (Timaeus 52 e - 53 a) "Place" in the last sentence translates topos, that is, the settled spot where bodies (s¯mata) come to reside once they have been thrown together with like bodies in the same region. What is the end of the tale for Plato -- the sedate outcome of a tumultuous cosmogony -- is the beginning of the story for Aristotle, who makes topos and not ch¯ra his primary concern. In Book Four of his Physics, Aristotle, commenting on Plato, identifies ch¯ra with hul÷, and makes the revealing claim that in his esoteric teachings Plato "declared that place and space were the same thing."8 The claim reveals more about Aristotle than about Plato, since it betrays Aristotle's own belief that ch¯ra does not precede or encompass topos. The same claim also looks forward to the characteristically modern notion that place and space differ from each other only trivially. But whereas the modernists want to dissolve place into space, Aristotle attempts to reduce space to place. What, then, does Aristotle mean by "place"? The Stagirite defines place as "the first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds"(Physics 212 a 20-21). For Aristotle, the exemplary case of place is that of a stationary vessel which contains a combination of air and water: "just as the vessel is a place which can be carried around, so place is a vessel which cannot be moved round"(212 a 14-16). Notice that this delimited and delimiting idea of place brings with it the supposition that place is primarily locatory and that what it locates is a physical thing: "not everything that is, is in a place, but [only] changeable body"(212 b 27-28). Place is where a thing is -- where the locative adverb "where" (pou) has the status of a universal category. But beyond locating (or, more exactly, as locating) place is something surrounding, with the result that a given place is co-extensive with what it contains: its inner surface and the outer surface of the thing contained are strictly contiguous: "the limits are together with what is limited."9 Just here problems arise -- problems that were to preoccupy commentators on Aristotle for at least a millenium, and still do. For example, on Aristotle's account the place of a boat moored in a river will continually change since the surface of the water in immediate contact with the boat will alter constantly as the water flows past the boat. But if the appropriate surrounder is itself located in something "unchangeable," such as the solid bank of the river, then two boats equidistant from the same bank will occupy the same place despite being in different locations in the water itself.10 In my view, these problems, all of them stemming from Aristotle's constrictive sense of place as locating and (especially) surrounding, are more grave than those arising from his doctrine of "natural place," according to which "each thing moves to its own place."11 On closer inspection, it becomes clear that this controversial doctrine commits Aristotle only to a particular physicalist model of region, not of place proper:
Regarding this debate -- which stretches from Strato and the Stoics to Patrizi and Gassendi -- two general remarks are in order. First, it was Aristotle's unswerving commitment to the power of place that upheld a conversation that is surely one of the most concerted and fruitful in the history of philosophy: had place not been accorded such dunamis, it would not have been worth the effort of so much discussion concerning its exact nature. Second, despite its considerable dynamism, place gradually lost out to space in the course of the two millenia in question. For many ancient Greeks, what I like to call the Archtyian Axiom was taken to be unquestionably true: to be is to be in place; conversely, to be without place is not to be.13 Plato and Aristotle alike, their differences concerning place vs. space notwithstanding, both cite versions of this axiom -- as do such disparate thinkers as Gorgias and Zeno. Aristotle's endorsement is most to the point: "everyone supposes that things that are are somewhere, because what is not is nowhere -- where for instance is a goat-stage or a sphinx?"14 But, beginning with Philoponus, who in the sixth century A.D. posited an empty spatial extension, and continuing through Crescas and Bradwardine (both of whom insisted, seven centuries later, on the spatial infinity of God), we reach a point in the Renaissance when a quite different axiom captivated philosophical (as well as scientific and theological) minds: to be is now to be in space, where "space" means something non-local and non-particular, something having little to do with close containment and everything to do with an outright infinity. KoyrŽ has aptly described this radical transformation of thought, this triumph of space over place, as a movement "from the closed world to the infinite universe."15
IIIBefore coming to the modern epoch itself, I want to dwell for a moment on a fascinating but neglected chapter of the ancient era in its Hellenistic and more particularly its Neoplatonic course. I shall single out only two figures from a galaxy of philosophers who devoted themselves to thinking about place and space after Aristotle: Iamblichus and Philoponus. Both were critics and creative transformers of Aristotle. Iamblichus (who lived in the fouth century A.D. and was an important influence on seventeenth century views of space)16 concedes the importance of the surrounding limit in the determination of place, but he refuses to conceive of this limit as a mere "surface"(epiphaneia) that is geometrically structured. Instead, place should be conceived in terms of "boundary"(horos), which is an active power -- so active that it is even said to be "the primary cause (arch÷gos)" of bodies.17 But for it to be such a cause, i.e., a cause both as defining a body and as the source of the body's existence,18 place qua boundary has to be more than corporeal, given Iamblichus' premise (doubtless derived from Plotinus) that "everywhere the incorporeal reality ranks as prior to the corporeal one. And so place, being incorporeal, is superior to the things that exist in it."19 Precisely as incorporeal, the power of place consists in more than its encompassingness. In one of the most extraordinary statements of placial power ever made in the West, Iamblichus proclaims that this power consists in "sustaining and supporting bodies, raising up the falling ones and gathering together the scattered ones, filling them up as well as encompassing them from every side."20 "Sustaining and supporting," as well as "raising up," refer to the way that a given place holds bodies in certain postures, forestalling their falling freely in space, while "gathering together" suggests that these postures are held in a single coherent pattern in relation to each other. "Filling up," on the other hand, implies that place, far from being a mere "termination" or "last extremity" of bodies -- or even their " common limit" -- insinuates itself into these very bodies and acts as their dynamic indwelling agent: "regarded thus, place will not only encompass bodies from outside, but will fill them totally with a power which raises them up."21 Moreover, such an indwelling and upholding power applies to non-material as well as to material things -- to anything that is "contained" in anything else.22 With the mention of "contained"(periechomenon), we have come full cycle from an Aristotelian starting-point. "Containment" remains a sine que non for being in place; yet now it is only a minimal criterion, inasmuch as true placial power is found in actions of sustaining and upholding, gathering and filling things. Rather than things defining places -- as occurs on any strict container model, since the container has to take its cue from the contained -- places empower things from (and as) their boundaries. If Iamblichus looks back to Aristotle -- only to radically revise him -- Philoponus looks forward to the modern age, parlaying Plato into the present. If Plato's conception of ch¯ra can be considered the precursor of modernist notions of space, this is even more true of Philoponus' treatment of the same term. Take, for instance, Philoponus's claim that "we do not maintain that extension is a body, but that it is the room of a body and [is] only empty dimensions without any substance and matter [to fill it up]."23 As the room of a body (ch¯ra s¯matos), place or space cannot be defined, much less confined, by body alone. But, rather than being a power that connects and fills bodies -- it is even said to be without any power of its own24 -- ch¯ra is held to be a pure dimensional entity: a matter of "only empty dimensions" (diastaseis monas kenas). Indeed, Philoponus' most telling critique of Aristotle's surrounder view is that surface qua surface is two-dimensional, while bodies in place are three-dimensional. Thus place (topos) is said to be "cubic, cubic in the sense of three-dimensionally extended (trich÷ diastaton)."25 Philoponus, the discoverer of impetus in physics, is parachronistically modern in two ways when it comes to matters of place and space. First, diastaseis, the word for "dimension," is closely akin to diast÷ma, Greek for "interval" or "extension," and in their affinity both terms anticipate Descartes' insistence on the three-dimensional character of res extensa: to be extended is to be three-dimensional and vice versa. Second, the more Philoponus pursues the difference between "corporeal" and "spatial" extension -- i.e., the extension of a given body and that of the place or "room" in which that body is located -- the more he envisions, contra Descartes, an open space that is at once empty and immense. Spatial extension is empty in the manner of a void: "there exists an extension different from the bodies which happen to be in it, a void (kenon) in its proper sense, and this is also precisely place."26 But such a void, though in principle always present, is in fact always filled with bodies, resulting in a universe as plenary as Descartes and Aristotle (both fierce critics of the void) might have wished.27 Spatial extension is also immense: Philoponus even speaks of a "cosmic extension"(to kosmikon diast÷ma) that is "the room and the place of the universe."28 An extension that is co-extensive with the universe (to pantos) -- which is what results from pushing the idea of spatial extension to its cosmological limit -- is clearly heading toward the idea of a spatial infinity that knows no end. At least this is so once it is assumed that the universe itself is no closed whole (as it certainly still was for Aristotle) and has no effective limits: an idea that was explored extensively by such medieval thinkers as Walter Burleigh and Richard of Middleton, and by a Renaissance figure like Bruno, who drew out the full consequences of Philoponus' notion of a cosmically vast spatial extension. Yet we do not have to wait for medieval theology or for Renaissance science to appreciate the increasingly powerful attraction of an unlimited, an undelimited, spatiality. The attraction, one could almost say the fatal attraction, is already evident in Philoponus. In the allure of this burgeoning infinity, there is little room left for place. The slippery slope of its eventual demise has already been broached in the sixth century A.D. It is especially telling that Philoponus lumps together the two terms ch¯ra and topos in the indifferent hendiadys "room and place," or "space and place," as if to signify that the struggle to keep these terms distinct from each other is no longer worth the candle. When Philoponus adds that the universe at large "does not have in itself any differences," this lack of "differences" (diaphorai) entails that there are no intrinsic configurations within cosmical extension, thus nothing like particular places that possess an autonomy or power of their own.29
IVA thousand years later and we find ourselves in the dense imbroglio of the seventeenth century. If I leap this far ahead, it is not only because of my embarrassing ignorance of most of the intervening millenium -- whose obsession with the void has been characterized as "much ado about nothing" by Edward Grant30 -- but also because of my conviction that a late Neoplatonist such as Philoponus already espoused what we take to be a distinctively modern idea of space as absolute and infinite. This idea is decidedly pre-modern in origin, despite the received wisdom that it is comparatively recent: received and revived, for example, by Michel Foucault, who considers the medieval conception of space to be restricted to "the space of emplacement," to "a hierarchic ensemble of places" without any significant sense of infinite space.31 Even Alexandre KoyrŽ, otherwise such a sure-footed guide in these matters, intimates that only in the seventeenth century do we find the substitution for the conception of the world as a finite and well-ordered whole, in which the spatial structure embodied a hierarchy of perfection and value, that of an indefinite or even infinite universe no longer united by natural subordination, but unified only by the identity of its ultimate and basic components and laws; and the replacement of the Aristotelian conception of space -- a differentiated set of inner-worldly places -- by that of Euclidean geometry-- an essentially infinite and homogeneous extension -- from now on considered as identical with the real space of the world.32 But all of the elements of this supposed seventeenth century revolution were already present long before "the century of Genius." Homogeneity is entailed by the neutrality of Platonic ch¯ra, and Euclidean geometry is actively at work in the Philoponean model of three-dimensional spatial extension, while infinity is at least implied in the cosmical extension of the same extension. In short, space in its supposedly "modern" format has been around for much longer than three centuries, and it is time to set the record straight.33 I am even prepared to argue that Descartes, that arch-demon of early modernity, takes several steps back compared with Philoponus and his numerous medieval and Renaissance progeny. Not only does he equivocate concerning the existence of spatial infinity (preferring to speak of the indefinite instead), but he retains a remarkably Aristotelian conception of "external place" as "the surface immediately surrounding what is in the place."34 As such a surface, external place encloses the "internal place" or volume of a body, delineating its exact size and shape. Thus we are taken right back to a body-based model of place. If internal place is equivalent to corporeal extension in the Philoponean sense, the "space" it occupies is tantamount to Philoponus's notion of spatial extension. Significantly, Descartes refuses to generalize such extension to the point of something "cosmic": at most, it possess a "generic unity" that allows different bodies of the same volume to occupy it.35 On the familiar Cartesian formula, space is matter: there is no space without the matter that occupies it, and no matter that is not extended three-dimensionally as a volume in space. In its full characterization, however, res extensa comprehends not only the volume of particular bodies but also the positions of these bodies -- which is to say, their places. For in the end Descartes ascribes position to place and volume to space: The difference between the terms "place" and "space" is that the former designates more explicitly the position, as opposed to the size or shape [i.e., the volume], while it is the size and shape that we are concentrating on when we talk of space... When we say that a thing is in a given place, all we mean is that it occupies such and such a position relative to other things; but when we go on to say that it fills up a given space or place, we mean in addition that it has precisely the size and shape of the space in question.36 This seemingly innocent remark -- including its telltale hendiadys "space or place" -- harbors momentous consequences. For in singling out position as intrinsic to place (and thus as extrinsic to space qua volume), Descartes is departing from Aristotle and Philoponus and proposing something that will preoccupy the entire early modern period. This is the notion of what Whitehead calls "simple location," construed as "the very foundation of the seventeenth century scheme of nature."37 Simple location encompasses both place and space -- in whatever acceptation these terms assume during this century -- just as it bridges over the celebrated differences between absolutist and relativist views of space and time. According to the doctrine of simple location, any "bit of matter" -- i.e., any physical body -- "is where it is, in a definite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time."38 Put in the terms just discussed by Descartes, simple location is the view that position matters most in questions of place. A simple location is a position in a determinate region and thus a position relative to other occupants of that region -- even if, as Whitehead stresses, that region itself is considered without reference to other regions. Others in the history of philosophy, most notably Theophrastus and Aquinas, had certainly noticed the crucial role of relative position in the determination of place. But position as such began to become thematic, and not exceptional, only in the second half of the seventeenth century, that is, after the publication of Principles of Philosophy in l644. Still in equipoise with volume in the Principles, it was soon to become an obsessive concern of thinkers as diverse as Locke and Newton and Leibniz. John Locke thinks of place and space alike in terms of measurable distance: "each different distance is a different modification of space; and each idea of any different distance, or space, is a simple mode of this idea."39 By compounding particular distances, we reach the idea of "immensity," or, more vividly put, "the undistinguishable inane of infinite space."40 But Locke is no more committed to infinite space than is Descartes. His concern is with finite relations of distance between discrete positions in space. Thus his concept of place is "nothing else but [the] relative position of anything."41 In comparison with relative position, the idea of volume or "capacity" is said to be "confused."42 What matters is not extension as such -- a term Locke attempts to avoid43 -- but the measurable aspects of extension, and these aspects all depend on determinate positions. So powerful is the idea of relative position that it comes to dominate what Locke has to say about both space and place. Although officially place is said to be "but a particular limited consideration" of space, in the end the determination of each is exactly the same: "as in simple space, we consider the relation of distance between any two bodies or points; so in our idea of place, we consider the relation of distance betwixt anything, and any two or more points, which are considered as keeping the same distance one with another, and so considered as at rest."44 The difference between space and place -- a difference respected, even if continually contested, for two millenia in Western thought -- begins to dissolve in the acidic solution of purely relational positions. In this important regard, Locke is more consummately modern than is Descartes. Everyone knows that Newton considered space and time to be absolute entities, the "infinite sensoria" of God Himself. The absolutism is undoubtedly there, although it is likely to be more the mark of Gassendi and More than of Newton's own proclivities. A close look at the text of the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, published only shortly before Locke's Essay, shows that, despite the rhetoric of "absolute space," there is an undercurrent of relativism that brings the two Englishmen much closer than one might have guessed is possible. Even if Newton denies that place consists in "situation" and at least once defines place as a "a part of space which a body takes up" -- i.e., the Cartesian notion of internal place so resolutely rejected by Locke -- he describes "relative space" as "some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces; which our senses determine by its position to bodies."45 By this last phrase, Newton means the simple locations of physical bodies in relation to each other. Indeed, "all places" are said to be defined "from the positions and distances of things from any body considered as immovable."46 Not only is Newton extremely close to Locke in this last claim, but he espouses place-relativism even more fiercely than his compatriot by positing that "immovable places" are "those that, from infinity to infinity, do all retain the same given position one to another."47 The physical universe itself, in other words, is composed of fixed places -- "primary" or "absolute" places -- a significant part of whose very absolutism consists in their unchanging relation to each other.48 No wonder, then, that Whitehead can say that "simple location holds whether we look on a region of space-time as determined absolutely or relatively."49 Otherwise put: Kant's effort to contrast Newton and Leibniz as offering strictly incompatible models of space is misleading at the very least. Just as there is much more respect for placial and spatial relativism in Newton than Kant admits, so there is in Leibniz a lingering shadow of absolutism -- as when Leibniz defines space as "that which comprehends all those places."50 Nevertheless, the shadow is only a shadow of the primary phenomenon of space conceived as "something merely (purement) relative,"51 words that directly echo Locke. For space is officially defined as "an order of co-existences."52 Such an order is interpreted as "situation or distance,"53 where situation is equivalent to relative position or, more exactly, to sameness of place: "place is that, which is the same in different moments to different existent things, when their relations of co-existence with certain other existents, which are supposed to continued fixed from one of those moments to the other, agree entirely together."54 Thus Leibniz can boast that "in order to explain what place is, I have been content to define what is the same place."55 In making this move, Leibniz has accomplished two things: he has reduced place to relative position (for it is into the same relative position that "different existent things" can step) and he has conflated place with space. A sign of this conflation -- the same we find in Philoponus and in Locke -- is found in Leibniz's casual but concerted use of the same hendiadys so revealingly employed by Descartes as well: namely, "place and space."56
VIn the remainder of this essay, I want to address two major issues: first, the effect of the triumph of the relational view of place, including the effect of assimilating place to space; second, the consequences of this assimilation for the emergence of the "modern subject." In both cases, we shall be considering the larger stakes in a story that may have struck you so far as a mere matter of curiosity. Whatever intrinsic interest this story has, you may be asking yourself: fine, but so what? Let me try to say what this what amounts to in two stages. 1. First, to the degree the relational view of place/space won out in the modern period the West witnessed less the apotheosis of infinite space than the demise of place as an independent and viable concept. In large part, place was absorbed into space; insofar as it survived at all, it was in the denuded form that I shall call, for lack of a better term, "site." It is my view that, contra KoyrŽ, the advent of the infinity of space was to begin with (and perhaps most enduringly) the creation of the late Neoplatonic period of Hellenistic philosophy. The idea of such infinity was available ever since Philoponus espoused a truly "cosmical extension." In this light, later and more celebrated thinkers such as Giordano Bruno and Nicolas of Cusa only pursued the idea to its bitter end -- for instance, in the extreme notion that there is not just infinite space but an infinite number of worlds in such space. This laltlter was an idea for which Bruno was burned at the stake in l600, suggesting that the seventeenth century opened with the effort to suppress infinite space. Leading thinkers of this century continued to dispute such space, especially insofar as it entailed the void, concerning which Locke and Newton were supportive, and Descartes and Leibniz virulently opposed: their very variance on this issue exhibiting the uncertain destiny of infinite space during the century. At the same time, and for many of the same reasons, the idea of place was beginning to disappear from philosophical and scientific discourse. Prominent minds of the time felt compelled to consider it -- to give some account of it, however convoluted such an account might be. This is exactly what we witness in Descartes, whose discussion of "internal" vs. "external" place is ultimately more confusing than clarifying. Place remains on Newton's list of master predicables: "time, space, place, and motion,"57 but his treatment of it raises more questions than it answers: above all, how is "place" finally distinct from "space" (both are ultimately immovable and static; both are homogeneous in constitution and isometric in measurability; etc.)? We have seen how both Locke and Leibniz are driven to assimilate place to space under the common heading of relative position or situation. Despite the lip service still paid to the term "place," by the end of the century (or, more exactly, by l7l5-16, the date of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence), in fact place has been indifferently merged with space and is no longer deemed worthy of separate treatment -- as it still was for Gassendi and Descartes. When Pascal wrote that "the silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,"58 he was commenting as much on the increasing absence of place as an anchor from which to view such spaces as he was on any new cosmology or physics of space itself . A century later, place is no longer discussed at all, much less missed, in philosophy. With the single exception of Kant's exceptional pre- Critical essay of 1768 "Concerning the Differentiation of Regions in Space," it is difficult to find any significant treatment of place from the death of Leibniz in 1716 until Bergson's Latin dissertation of l888, whose topic is Aristotle's notion of place: as if Bergson realized that to take up the topic again one has to return to this most sober and thorough of ancient discussions. (The irony, of course, is that Bergson's Time and Free Will, published the very next year, asserts the primacy of durational time in human experience, thereby reinforcing the temporocentrism that had been regnant since the publication of The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and that reached an apogee in the evolutionism and historicism of the nineteenth century.) My interpretation of this extraordinary circumstance -- in which one of the indispensable topics of ancient, medieval, and even early modern philosophy came to be so deeply neglected -- is two-fold. First, "place" was absorbed into "space" as the dominant term of Eurocentric discourse; compared with the unbounded extent and even distribution of space, place came to seem merely parochial, a matter indeed of "particular limited consideration." The increasing ease with which the very word "place" became exchangeable with "space" is a leading symptom of this absorptive hegemony of the spatial world. Second, a progressive disenchantment with the idea of spatial infinity set in after the intoxication -- and the terror -- of late Renaissance and early modern vistas of "the undistinguishable inane of infinite space." If place was taken up into space (becoming merely "a part of space" in Newton's phrase again), its ghostly remnant was transmuted into site. By this latter term, I mean the levelled-down, emptied-out planiform residuum of place deprived of its actual and virtual "powers" (the very powers on which Aristotle and Iamblichus laid such eloquent stress). The result is "striated space," defined by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus as "the relative global: it is limited in its parts, which are assigned constant directions, are oriented in relation to one another, divisible by boundaries, and can be fit together."59 I take Leibniz (influenced decisively by Locke) to be the primary culprit in this dire development: his notion of space as "something merely relative," led him to propose a new discipline of "site analysis" (analysis situs, a rigorous analytic-geometric discipline). If space and place are both utterly relational, a sheer order of co-existing points, then they will not retain any of the inherent properties ascribed to place by ancient and early modern philosophers: properties of encompassing, holding, sustaining, gathering, situating ("situation" in Leibniz does not situate at all; it merely positions in a nexus of relations). So as not to incriminate Leibniz unduly, let me simply say that he brought to its logical term the full implications of the stranglehold of simple location in which so many of his immediate predecessors were also ensnared. As Whitehead himself points out, the direct result of simple location in philosophy as in physics is the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. For our purposes, this means a loss of the concrete particularity of place as well as the abstract absoluteness of infinite space -- and the dissolution of both in the emptiness of sites. The supremacy of site is the great theme of Foucault's examination of eighteenth century disciplinary and institutional spaces. At the beginning of The Birth of the Clinic, he speaks of "the flat surface of perpetual simultaneity"60 that characterizes medical perception and practice in the century of Enlightenment. This surface, traversed by the gaze of the examining physician, is at once homogeneous and segmented: homogeneous as the sheer display of a given medical syndrome and segmented as located in the actual physical body of a patient. The first is the basis for what Foucault calls the "configuration" of knowledge, the second for the "localization" of that same knowledge: these two terms being suggestive remnants of space and place respectively. But they are no more than relics of a previous discourse now overtaken by the discourse of site: the site, the exact location, of a disease in a particular part of the afflicted body. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault extends this analysis situs -- no longer geometric but fully historical and political in his deft hands -- to entire institutional settings, including the architecture of these settings. Now the surface of simultaneity (notice the presence of the Leibnizian criterion of co-existence surviving in Foucault's locution) is embodied in the structure of prisons, hospitals, factories, barracks, reformatories, asylums, etc. Both in architectural plan and in disciplinary rŽgime, each of these institutions combines seriality with carcerality: in their built reality, each is in effect a line of cells, a set of segmented but contiguous and isomorphic subsites within the major site of the institution itself. The result is a "space of domination" in which surveillance prevails at every possible panoptical point61 and in which space and place alike (assuming these terms are still somehow distinguishable) are fixed: "it is a segmented, imobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place."62 Everything in site-space is "constantly located."63 What was a matter of simple location in seventeenth century physics and philosophy has become the constant location of the "disciplinary individual," of "calculable man," in the course of the eighteenth century.64 The act of "elementary location or partitioning" is tantamount to the suppression of active place and space -- not to mention time, now strictly regulated by chronometric means in the workplace.65 "The rule of functional sites" has taken over space, time, and place in a veritable "laboratory of power" whose aim is to bring about a rigid "location of bodies in space."66 Thanks to the micro-practices of disciplinary power, such bodies become "docile bodies" in Foucault's memorable term67 -- bodies which exist only in sites and as a function of sites.68 These bodies are disembodied precisely to the extent that they have become disemplaced. 2. A second thing that matters is the fate of the human subject in all this. If Foucault is right in claiming that the very idea of "Man," as homo universalis, is the creation of the eighteenth century, we can also say that, long before twentieth century deconstructions of the generically human, the plight of the subject was becoming extreme. Literally so: as Hannah Arendt remarks, alienation in the modern world consists in a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self."69 The modern subject finds herself/himself caught between the extremes of universe and self -- which is to say, between the infinite exteriority of the spatial universe and the infinitesimal interiority of the Cartesian cogito. "Nothing," says Pascal, "can fix the finite between the two infinites which enclose it and which escape its grasp."70 In between is a vacuum, one of whose main expressions is a lack of the "public realm," to use Arendt's term for the primary privation of modernity. I would prefer to call this dearth of the public realm a lack of public place -- an absence of concrete, perceptible locales that allow for bodily ingression as well as for collective historicity. One absolute, entirely external, rejoins the other, wholly internal, calling for a place of certainty -- which is to say, calling for place itself -- in the face of the abyss opened up by the absence of place. Pascal's anguished outcries issue from the lack of any such place-certainty. The anguish, felt as intolerable, cannot last for long. This is doubtless why site (qua relative position) quickly emerged to paper over the abyss of no-place. The very attributes of sites -- their homogeneity, isotropism, isometrism, unidirectionality, monolinearity -- conspired to act as tranquilizing forces in the generation of empty, planiform surfaces of simultaneity. But these same attributes can scarcely hide the fact that site, though the successor to place, is also its antithesis, its antidote, indeed its pharmakon -- the remedy that is the undoing. If infinite space can still be considered as place in extremis (i.e., as the place of the universe as a whole: which is why Newton, concerned with just such a super-place, cannot dispense with the language of place altogether and can even call it "absolute"), site is no longer placelike in any significant respect. And if infinite space can be considered place taken to its limit, site is the dismantling of place itself, its de-limitation. Site is anti-place dancing on the abyss of no-place. It is emblematic that Kant, who brings modernity to its most rigorous and systematic point, finally has no room for place in his conception of the human subject. By this I mean not just that the very term "place" drops out of his discourse regarding the subject (it remains only as "position"[Stelle] in his discussion of physical movement) but that the phenomenal self, the only self we can know, is radically unemplaced. The only effective unity of this self is the unity of consciousness, the "I think" that accompanies cognition. Beyond this frail and formal unity there is nothing more lasting to grasp -- nothing substantial, nothing simple, nothing of the nature of an abiding self. Even "in inner intuition," says Kant, "there is nothing permanent, for the 'I' is merely the consciousness of my thought."71 As the Paralogisms of Pure Reason make clear, we cannot know the human subject as a subject: "we do not have, and cannot have, any knowledge whatsoever of any such subject."72 Of course, for Kant there is a deep subject, the noumenal self, but this "subject of our thoughts"73 and of moral action is not the object of any possible knowledge. Nor is this transphenomenal subject situated in space or time -- nor, a fortiori, in place. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the phenomenal self itself is so situated. In his discussion of the Paralogisms Kant says that "neither space nor time, however, is to be found save in us."74 If so, it would follow that the phenomenal subject is not in space and time (since they are in the subject) and thus that this same subject is also not in place. With Kant, then, we reach an extremity that was already nascent in Descartes: the modern subject is a placeless subject. This subject, living only in the flattened-out sites it itself projects or constructs, cannot count on any abiding place in the world. The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness brings in its train the Fallacy of a Displaced Self: a purely phenomenal Self displaced into merely epiphenomenal Sites. The simple location of things ends in the positioning of human beings in a succession of sheer sites -- thereby inculcating docile bodies to occupy these sites. These bodies and sites are indifferent to one another and to the placeless selves they are supposed to subserve.
VIWe do not have to agree with Arendt that the primary kind of place lacking in modernity is the public scene of open political debate, the place of the agora and the agon.75 But it is difficult to deny some significant connection between the demise of place as a viable philosophical category and the rise of the alienated modern subject. The alienation first articulated by Pascal and then codified and rationalized by Kant is, I would suggest, an alienation from place at least as much as it is an alienation from abiding metaphysical and religious ideas and ideals. The turn to the "juridical" subject of human rights in the latter part of the eighteenth century was not accidentally inspired by John Locke's liberalism: the abstractness and universality of these rights are consonant with, indeed reflective of, the lack of concrete implacement for subjects who lived in the wake of Cromwell (and, more than a century later in France, of the ancient rŽgime). Just as Foucault argues that the putatively free individual of modern liberal society is a product of the disciplinary technology of power -- "the 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines"76 -- so I would argue that the same individual is a creature of lack of location. The modern subject is a dislocated, or perhaps more exactly, a dyslocated subject, someone who does not know the difference between place and space, or even the difference between either of these and the sites to which he or she is confined in the pseudo-voluntarism that thinks that such a subject can go any place. But this global nomadism is a deluson, since to be able to go anywhere is to be located nowhere. In place of the false "global absolute" that is the proper realm of infinite, homogeneous, and striated space, we need to rediscover the "local absolute" that is the domain of true nomadism. The latter absolute is "an absolute that is manifested locally, and [it is] engendered in a series of local operations of varying orientations."77 Local operations are actions taken in particular places, that is to say, in "smooth spaces," about which Deleuze and Guattari have this to say: Smooth space is precisely the space of the smallest deviation: therefore it has no homogeneity, except between infinitely proximate points, and the linking of proximities is effected independently of any determined path. It is a space of contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather than a visual space like Euclid's striated space. Smooth space is a field without conduits or channels. A field, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric, acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities which occupy space without 'counting' it and [which] can 'only be explored by legwork'.78 Such a distinctively post-modern space may offer a way of getting back into place -- a place where the human subject can pursue once again assume a vita activa that has become smothered in the toils of an unemplaced modernity, and thereby regain an anchor in the known world. The names for such a renewed sense of place will be various: "region" in late-Heideggerian thought, "enclave" in Lyotard's work, "earth" in the case of ecology, and so on. Of course, these names are also ancient: "region" translates ch¯ra, "enclave" carries forward ch¯rion and ch¯ridion (still other variations on Platonic ch¯ra), and "earth" is central to Aristotle's cosmology as well as to Iamblichus's imaginative extension of that cosmology.79 In this way, we might begin to realize that "topoanalysis" which Bachelard sketched in The Poetics of Space -- and to which Heidegger's equally sketchy "Topology of Being" seems strangely to correspond.80 We might also start to reinstate place itself within our lives, philosophical and otherwise, and to take these lives beyond liberties and disciplines, cells and series, docile bodies and equally docile minds. The untethered subject might begin to repossess itself in and around particular places. At the very least, to smooth spaces we need to add rough-edged places if the post-modern subject is to be re-attached to the concrete life-world (or perhaps we should now say: "placeworld"). To do so would be to reconnect place and space themselves as members of a new indefinite dyad that challenges the all too definite monads of Time and Site. It would be to tell a new tale of two cities -- of Place and Space, neither of these being beholden to Site or tied to Time. In starting, I said that time is one and space is two. We have seen, if mostly by indirection, how this is so -- how time, for example, tends toward the hegemonic and monistic (most evidently in nineteenth century thought) or simply the self-unified (in the transcendental subject, or even in the sense that in reading this essay you have been immersed in one continuous stretch of time). Space, on the other hand, is two -- at least two, though not merely because there are in fact several sorts of space, such as hyperspaces or virtual spaces (these being the concern of the topologically minded mathematician). Rather, space forms a twosome, an uneven doublet, with place, its odd and incongruous other. The twoness is not that of two things, of even of two of a kind, but instead that of two quite variant kinds -- which nevertheless co-exist in all their disparity and cannot seem to do otherwise. Hence the ongoing saga of the uneasy alliances, the ambivalent togethernesses, of place and space.
Aristotle proclaimed that "the minimum number, strictly speaking, is two."81 I have focussed on the minimal dyad of place and space. But if we were to find ourselves in a more generous mood, we might imagine an indefinite tetrad in which new notions of all four terms could re-engage philosophical thought. From this tetrad would emerge differing (but not altogether different) ideas of what it means to be in a place, how it is to be encompassed by endless space, by what means sites can be re-instated in non-debilitating ways, and how time may appear otherwise. The sardonic unsettling effected by the post-modern period might thereby give way to the rethinking of terms whose continuing importance will be re-
affirmed but whose effective significance will, at the same time, be radically altered in direction and force.
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